In the fourth volume of Fantagraphics’ Captain Easy series, our eponymous hero and his loyal sidekick Wash Tubbs answer a newspaper ad that they don’t know is years out of date, and wind up stranded in Guatemala with a busted landing gear and only five dollars to their name. Whoops! They need all their wits and ingenuity to get them out of this fix. Which they manage to do by the skin of their teeth, only to stumble onto a lost city in the jungle. Lost cities in the jungle are never good news, and so it is with our two boisterous heroes. Against all odds, they extricate themselves from this dastardly peril and head for home on a ship carrying tigers (Roy Crane loved to draw tigers). They’re out of danger, right? Wrong! What kind of a Captain Easy adventure would this be without our boys getting stranded on a desert island and encountering the beautiful but savage Wolf Girl (Crane loved to draw Wolf Girls!)?

Written by black, gay science-fiction writer, professor, and theorist Samuel R. Delany, and drawn by artist/martial arts instructor Mia Wolff, Bread & Wine is a graphic autobiography that flashes back to the unlikely story of how Delany befriended Dennis, and how they became an enduring couple — Delany, a professor at Philadelphia’s Temple University, Dennis, an intelligent man living on the streets.

For casual readers and fans, Bread & Wine is a moving, sexually charged love story, with visuals informed by Wolff’s professional physical pursuits. Her black-and-white pen-and-ink work not only expressionistically represents the characters’ “body language” and the bustling New York setting, but is also filled with impish art references and visual puns. The scholarly potential for the book, based on the poem “Bread and Wine” by the German lyric poet Friedrich Holderlin, not only encompasses queer, African-American, and graphic novel studies, but also exploration in the literary and paraliterary academic fields.

This edition includes an introduction by Watchmen writer Alan Moore, commentary by the book’s protagonists, Delany and Dennis, and a new interview with Delany and Wolff.

“The ridiculously brilliant Samuel R. Delany is one of our most important living writers. Delany is a critical and creative colossus and with Bread and Wine he has produced a miniture masterpiece. Profoundly moving and hilariously honest (rotting socks anybody?), Bread and Wine is the kind of love story that renews ones faith in the incadescent power of love. Don’t believe love is possible? Read Bread and Wine. Just broke up? Read Bread and Wine. Met someone who spins this fallen world into beauty? Read Bread and Wine — together. What Delany’s tender account of his unlikely relationship with the gentle cheerful (and homeless) Dennis underscores is the humanity that love requires but also the humanity that love in turns renders. Backed by Mia Wolff’s arresting (and occasionally rapturous) inks Delany’s tale of cross-cultural cross-racial cross-class intimacy is a gift of wonder.” – Junot Díaz

“Samuel R. Delany is one of the finest living American writers. In this revealing autobiographical love story, told in collaboration with fine artist Mia Wolff, Delany’s brilliance shines. It’s filthy and earthy and beautiful, like an orchid in a gutter; it tells you more than you wanted to know, and makes you glad it did.” – Neil Gaiman

“Told simply and methodically like Delany’s 1996 memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, the story is subdued yet acutely emotional. It reaches across the boundaries of race and class — as well as across hilariously opposed standards of personal hygiene — to capture two people in the process of building a life together.” – Publishers Weekly

A “Notable Comic” in The Best American Comics 2013 (original serialized version)

Black is the Color begins with a 17th century sailor abandoned at sea by his shipmates, and as it progresses he endures, and eventually succumbs to, both his lingering death sentence and the advances of a cruel and amorous mermaid. The narrative also explores the experiences of the loved ones he leaves behind, on his ship and at home on land, as well as of the mermaids who jadedly witness his destruction. At the heart of the story lie the dubious value of maintaining dignity to the detriment of intimacy, and the erotic potential of the worst case scenario.

Julia Gfrörer’s delicate drawing style perfectly complements the period era of Black Is the Color, bringing the lyricism and romanticism of Gfrörer’s prose to the fore. Black Is the Color is a book as seductive as the sirens it depicts.

Advance Praise:

“Beautiful. Gfrörer has a light touch in finding the yearning and humor amongst life’s hard luck and even harder truths. A genuinely romantic and sensitive book.” – Sammy Harkham

“Julia Gfrörer is amongst the most promising artist/authors of her generation. Her work is spare and elegant, yet the hand of the artist is always evident in her line. Her characters inhabit cold or desolate environments, often on the brink of inanition or beyond, yet still yearning to love and be loved. Do not be misled by this artist’s sylphlike appearance and those great carrot-colored ramparts at her ear. Gfrörer is a powerhouse. Learn to spell her name.” — Phoebe Gloeckner

“No one is wedding horror’s darkness to an equally black, equally lacerating emotional palette as effectively as Julia Gfrörer…. When coupled with her delicate linework, the fragile physicality of her characters, and her explicit and non-idealized depictions of sex, the effect is gripping and even in our mundane world, ominously familiar.” – Sean T. Collins

Selected by Geneviève Castrée for her “best of 2013″ list at Indie Street

It would be easy to call Tom Kaczynski the J.G. Ballard of comics. Like Ballard,
Kaczynski’s comics riff on dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and
the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.
Yet while Kaczynski shares many of Ballard’s obsessions, he processes them in
unique ways. His visual storytelling adds an architectural dimension that the
written word alone lacks.

Kaczynski takes abstract ideas — capitalism, communism, or utopianism —
and makes them tangible. He depicts and meditates on the immense political
and technological structures and spaces we inhabit that subtly affect and define
the limits of who we are and the freedom we as Americans presume to enjoy.
Society and the individual, in perpetual tension. Once you’ve read Kaczynski’s
comics, it should come as no surprise to learn that he studied architecture before
embarking on a career as a cartoonist.

Beta Testing includes approximately 10 short stories, most notably “The New,” a brand new story created expressly for this book. It’s Kaczynski’s longest story to date. “The New” is set in an unnamed third-world megalopolis. It could be Dhaka, Lagos or Mumbai. The city creaks under the pressure of explosive growth. Whole districts are built in a week. The story follows an internationally renowned starchitect as he struggles to impose his vision on the metropolis. A vision threatened by the massive dispossessed slum-proletariat inhabiting the slums and favelas on the edges of the city. From the fetid ferment of garbage dumps and shanties emerges a new feral architecture.

Whether shooting pool with the mobster Crazy Joey Gallo, attending a dinner party hosted by an aged but remarkably spry Groucho Marx, or simply playing doctor with a classmate in the former estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kipp Friedman led a colorful childhood. The youngest son of celebrated writer and satirist Bruce Jay Friedman, Kipp looks back fondly on the amusing and sometimes confusing events and encounters that helped shape his early life in this moving tribute to growing up among a family of creative artists — swept up in the whirlwind of the New York arts scene of the 1960s and ’70s.

Follow Kipp’s exploits as bystander and willing participant as he joins older brothers Josh (writer and musician) and Drew (renowned cartoonist and illustrator) as three musketeers on a youthful quest to discover the scariest low-budget horror movies along 42nd Street and Times Square. Delight in their search for classic comic books, monster magazines (and the occasional “nudie” magazine) at their beloved, dingy “Back-Issue Store” in midtown Manhattan. Encounter his family’s bizarre Cold War-like relationship with their new neighbors in an updated suburban Jewish version of the Hatfields vs. the McCoys. Witness their Marx Brothers-like antics while on an all-expenses-paid junket at the Beverly Hills Hotel courtesy of CBS.

The stage shifts from New York City to the Caribbean to the suburbs of Long Island, and from the South of France to Broadway and Hollywood as Kipp retraces his family’s defining moments — with the backdrop of his father’s meteoric rise from editor of men’s adventure magazines to successful novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Through it all, Kipp paints a loving portrait of a childhood and family life that is both magical and yet familiar and real.

Barracuda in the Attic is truly a family affair, written by Kipp, with a cover illustration by Drew Friedman, an introduction by paterfamilias Bruce Jay Friedman, and an afterword by Josh Friedman, and is copiously illustrated with photos of the family and their literati friends and hangers-on.

Before authoring one of the most beloved children’s
book series of all time — Harold and the Purple Crayon —
cartoonist Crockett Johnson created the comic strip Barnaby for over ten years (1942 to 1952). Its subtle ironies and
playful allusions never won a broad following, but the adventures of 5-year-old Barnaby Baxter and his fairy godfather
Jackeen J. O’Malley was and is a critical favorite.

Fantagraphics introduces the wonders of Barnaby to a new generation of children and parents alike. Co-edited by
Johnson biographer Philip Nel (Dr. Seuss: American Icon) and Fantagraphics Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds, with art
direction by graphic novelist Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), this five-volume Barnaby series will collect the entirety of the
original newspaper strips from 1942-1952. The first volume collects all the strips from 1942 and 1943.

Barnaby revolved around a precocious five-year-old named Barnaby Baxter and his fairly godfather Jackeen J. O’Malley.
Yet O’Malley, a cigar-chomping, bumbling con-artist and fast-talker, was not your typical protector. His grasp of magic
was usually specious at best, limited to occasional flashes, often aided and abetted by his fellow members in The Elves,
Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men’s Chowder & Marching Society.

Barnaby’s deft balance of fantasy, political commentary, sophisticated wit, and elegantly spare images expanded our
sense of what comic strips can do. With subtlety and economy, Barnaby proved that comics need not condescend to
readers. Its small but influential readership took that message to heart.

“I think, and I’m trying to talk calmly, that Barnaby and his friends and oppressors are the
most important additions to American arts and letters in Lord knows how many years.”
– Dorothy Parker

“One of the best comic strips of the 20th Century and one of the most beloved older strips for
a generation of devoted adult comics fans, Barnaby had become in the last decade and a
half the great unsigned strip collection.” – The Comics Reporter

A self-portrait through one hundred portraits, Artists Authors Thinkers Directors explores cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier’s sketchbook renderings of those who shaped his (and many others’) artistic views.

Culled from his drawing blog — The Daily Forlorn, one of Tumblr’s featured illustration blogs — these portraits are as stylistically varied as the subjects they portray. A scrawled, single line drawing of Lenny Bruce shares space with a triangular Werner Heisenberg. A monochromatic, stippled Stanley Kubrick stares intently at a muppet-headed Frank Oz. Each turn of the page offers a new take on a familiar face.

In the afterword, Hornschemeier includes brief notes on each portrait and that creator’s particular work or insight that spoke specifically to him. And in that specificity, much of what is universally affecting in each creator shines through.

Hornschemeier’s graphic novels hop from one aesthetic to the next, varying the line and color quality to depict his narrative’s mood. He plays with the language of comics. In these portraits we can clearly see him hard at experimentation, adding to his vocabulary.

7 Miles a Second is the story of legendary artist David Wojnarowicz, written during the last years before his AIDS-related death in 1992. Artists James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook unsentimentally depict Wojnarowicz’s childhood of hustling on the streets of Manhattan, through his adulthood living with AIDS, and his anger at the indifference of government and health agencies. A primal scream of a graphic novel, 7 Miles a Second blends the stark reality of Lower East Side street life with a psychedelic delirium that artfully conveys Wojnarowicz’s sense of rage, urgency, mortality and a refusal to be silent.

Originally published as a comic book in 1996 by DC’s Vertigo Comics,7 Miles a Second was an instant critical success and has become a cult classic amongst fans of literary and art comics, just as Wojnarowicz’s influence and reputation have widened in the larger art world. This new edition finally presents the artwork as it was intended: oversized, and with Van Cook’s elegant watercolors restored. It also includes several new pages created for this edition.